There’s a debate around the pros and cons of urban beekeeping and its impact on country bees and the global bee threat of bee colony collapse. Whatever one’s position on the subject, it was a small ray of light in the sad story of the awesome fire that swept through Notre Dame on April 15, 2019 that the bees survived.

The fashion industry is responsible for 10% of the world’s carbon footprint and is considered to be the second biggest polluter of fresh water globally, producting 20% of the world’s industrial wastewater. Forbesadds that the global fashion industry uses 24% of insecticides and 11% of pesticides required to produce crops used in garments.

Until now, London has led the international pace in the fashion sustainability movement. This week, Paris weighed in with a new five-year plan designed to establish French credentials in this critical arena of public policy and environmental action.

Called ‘Paris Good Fashion,’ the project outlines a five-year plan to build an open, collaborative community of fashion professionals, entrepreneurs, designers and experts working together to make Paris a sustainable fashion capital.

Frédéric Hocquard, deputy to Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, and Antoinette Guhl, deputy in charge of social economy and solidarity, as well as former fashion journalist Isabelle Lefort, promised a more comprehensive project outline at a June 2019 event that will also feature campaigns promoting fashion recycling and conferences surrounding sustainable discussions

Laurence des Cars was named the new director of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, officially appointed by French President Francois Hollande on February 27. Currently the director of the Musée de l’Orangerie, des Cars will assume her new post on March 15, for a tenure of at least five years.

Le Monde reports that des Cars’s appointment is also significant in that she’s only the second woman curator to head a major Paris museum, alongside Sophie Makariou at the Musée Guimet.

The city of Paris is even more formative in my psyche than New York. Having worked in Paris well over 200 times, even moving to a residence hotel in the city for many years, for me Paris is the great international symbol of secular values. In its imperfection, Paris is also the symbol for the worst of imperialism, and I do not minimize the negative impact of Paris on other cultures in the world. This is the story of mankind -- not humankind, because women have had very little to do with the constructs of imperialism.

Still, Anne of Carversville embraces the values of secularism -- fearing orthodoxy in every religion as a far greater threat to the advancement of global civilization than any other force. At this moment, we wait to understand the full extent of the horrors perpetuated on ordinary citizens of France and their guests by ISIS thugs. As global citizens and women of courage, we refuse to be silent in the face of terrorists -- whatever flag they wave. ~ Anne

In 2004, a PDF of a book entitled “The Management Of Savagery” was posted online and circulated among Sunni jihadist circles. Scholars soon noticed that the book, which was published by an unknown author writing under the pseudonym “Abu Bakr Naji,” had become popular among many extremist groups such as al-Shabaab in Somalia, and was eventually translated into English for study in 2006 by William McCants, now the director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. The book, McCants told ThinkProgress, was written as an alternative to the decentralized, “leaderless” approach to jihadism popular in the mid-2000s. Instead of using isolated attacks on super powers all over the globe, “The Management Of Savagery” offered an expansive plan for how a group of Muslim militants could violently seize land and establish their own self-governing Islamic state — much like ISIS is trying to do today.

And then:

“The key idea in the book is that you need to carry out attacks on a local government and sensitive infrastructure — tourism and energy in particular,” McCants said. “That causes a local government to pull in security resources to protect that infrastructure that will open up pockets where there is no government — a security vacuum.”

Estimates of the crowds in Paris today range from the high hundreds of thousands to three million. There is no way to count this many people, but it seems the number of free-speech supporters from around the world in Paris today will settle in around one million. A long list of European heads of government joined French Prime Minister Francois Hollande to march arms and arm as a strong message of international solidarity.

Protestors waved flags in support of the dead cartoonists and other staff at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the victims of the Marais supermarket seizure, and the dead policewoman on the job for two weeks. Others promoted their own identities as Muslim, Jewish and a host of nationalities — but always with a message of solidarity around pens and pencils and the rights of free speech and public expression.

Supporting Free Expression In Solidarity With Paris

Two AOC favorites — street activist JR (source of eyeglass banner below) and Queen Rania of Jordan — were in attendance, and we will deal with them in separate articles. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was joined by French President Francois Hollande in a visit to a Parisian synagogue

Our thoughts are with the people of Paris today, the dead satirists who pushed the envelope of free speech and free expression will speak no more, although a request has gone global for media outlets to publish the anti-Islamic, Charlie Hebdo cartoons tomorrow.

Anne of Carversville will not be among them, as I am blacklasted in the Arab world already and my focus is women’s rights. If Islamists had launched a terrorist attack against the women of Paris for not wearing burquas, we would print anything needed against these brutes who kidnap little girls and decapitate aid workers on international TV.

Coming Soon

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